YoPlus Digestive: The Current State of Yogurt

The funny thing is that yogurt used to be health food, plain and simple. It needed neither adornment nor bells or whistles to attract a very particular customer looking for a tangy bacterial fermented milk product with untold health benefits. Then, somewhere in the late 1970s, something evolutionary happened. Some people say it was the advent of fruit at the bottom yogurt, others insist it was the general mainstreaming of yogurt (read: the addition of sugar), but in my opinion, it was the popularizing of frozen yogurt. This led "yogurt" down a path of mass appeal and acceptance.

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What does this have to do with anything? Well, what happened to yogurt during the ensuing years was that it diversified and became a little less healthy and a lot more popular. Emphasis was on fun brands and fun flavors that approximated ice cream and/or sugary breakfast cereals. Taking into account the many concerns about low vitamin intake along with countless cancer scares, yogurt has tried to clean up its act in recent years and become more healthy, in some instances more seemingly healthy than it originally was.

Enter YoPlus Digestive Blueberry Açai, the latest super fortified yogurt from the venerable Yoplait family. Yoplait, has its roots in the farmlands of Europe, and was made popular in the United States during the late 1970s with their precious conical yogurt containers. Now, with YoPlus Digestive, Yoplait is creating a yogurt that allegedly does things regular old yogurt just couldn't do.

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First off, there is the "digestive" factor to this fortified yogurt. Since yogurt is well known for its good bacteria, which helps aid in digestion, YoPlus Digestive is exploiting these intrinsic benefits and adding Bifidobacterium and various probiotic elements (beneficial live bacteria) to help you regulate your digestive tract. Anyone who has had one eye open to the recent marketing trend will be familiar with the current probiotic craze. In addition, YoPlus Digestive Blueberry Açai has 3 grams of added dietary fiber in the form of chicory root extract (inulin) which has become a very popular added ingredient in everything from ice cream to cake mix, as a cheap and easy way to add fiber. The jury is still out on whether adding fiber in this form has much of an impact on the digestive system, as compared to ingesting it in more natural forms like fruit, whole grains, and vegetables.

So product deconstruction aside, YoPlus Digestive Blueberry Açai is actually quite enjoyable. With a much more defined blueberry flavor than anything aÁai (I think most people would be hard pressed to clearly define the flavor of açai) and a relatively creamy taste for a low-fat yogurt, YoPlus Digestive will undoubtedly win some people over. However, whatever bonus fiber, probiotics, etc you gain from consuming a cup of this yogurt, you will also get sixteen bonus grams of sugar, which is quite significant in my book. The YoPlus Digestive FAQ on their website suggests that you eat one cup of YoPlus Digestive every day, which (in my book) is nearly as much sugar as a serving of Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Ice Cream. By all means, enjoy the yogurt with all of its purported benefits, but be warned of the impending sugar crash.

YoPlus Digestive is available in multiple flavors including Strawberry, Vanilla, Blackberry Pomegranate, and Peach, and is sold ($2.79 per four-pack) at PathMark, A&P, Target, Winn-Dixie, and Albertsons.